Construction of New Antimatter Factory at CERN

Homo-Sapiens (being the insane and awesome apes that we are) are now working to ramp up our production of antimatter. More antimatter, more experiments. More experiments, more knowledge.

What could possibly go wrong?


from Science World Report:

In the antimatter hall, four collaborations – ATRAP, ALPHA, ASACUSA and AEGIS – trap antiprotons using Penning traps, to make antihydrogen for experiments. But in most of today’s set-ups, more than 99% of the antiprotons from the AD are lost through the degrader foils that decelerate the particles from their ejection energy down to the energy suitable for trapping (around 5 keV).

(Photo : CERN)
The Antiproton Decelerator provides beams of low-energy antiprotons to experiments, mainly for studies of antimatter

 ELENA is designed to decelerate antiprotons in a well controlled way and to further reduce beam sizes and energy spreads with an electron cooler to increase the efficiency of deceleration, resulting in more trapped antiprotons.

Design is also under way for a new experiment – GBAR [see PDF] – that will be installed at the same time as ELENA; and the BASE collaboration has recently suggested adding an experiment to increase the precision of a measurement of the antiproton's magnetic moment by a factor of 1000. As well as more usable (or trappable) antiprotons, ELENA will be able to deliver beams almost simultaneously to four antimatter experiments resulting in an essential gain in total beam time for each experiment.